Breivik said he was a boy when path turned

Published 7:00 pm, Monday, July 25, 2011

OSLO, Norway (AP) — Anders Behring Breivik said he was a boy when his life’s path began to turn. It was during the first Gulf War, when a Muslim friend cheered at reports of missile attacks against American forces.

“I was completely ignorant at the time and apolitical but his total lack of respect for my culture (and Western culture in general) actually sparked my interest and passion for it,” the suspect in Norway’s bombing and mass shooting wrote in his 1,500-page manifesto.

The 32-year-old Norwegian said it was the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 that “tipped the scales” for him because he sympathized with Serbia’s crackdown on ethnic Albanian Muslims in Kosovo. A year later he said he realized that what he called the “Islamization of Europe” couldn’t be stopped by peaceful means.

Police and Breivik’s lawyer says he confessed to, but denied criminal responsibility for, Friday’s bombing at government headquarters in Oslo and the mass shooting later that day at an island summer camp organized by the youth wing of the ruling Labor Party. At least 93 people were killed in the attacks.

Breivik’s manifesto chronicled events that deepened his contempt for Muslims and “Marxists” he blamed for making Europe multicultural. He suggested his friends didn’t even know what he was up to, and comments from several people who had contact with the quiet blond man indicate he was right.

Jack Levin, a professor at Northeastern University who has written a number of books on mass murderers, said the manifesto helps Breivik show himself as more human.

“It makes the killer look like a victim rather than a villain,” Levin said.

From September 2009 through October 2010, Breivik posted more than 70 times on Dokument.no, a Norwegian site with critical views on Islam and immigration. In one comment, he entertained the idea of a European Tea Party movement.

In December of 2009, Breivik showed up at a meeting organized by the website’s staff.

“He was a bit strange. As one could see from his postings, he had obviously read a lot but not really digesting it,” said Hans Rustad, the editor of the website.

But Rustad said he “hadn’t the faintest idea” about Breivik’s murderous plans.

“Other people have the same views on the Net and they don’t go out and become mass murderers. So how can you tell?” Rustad told The Associated Press.

In the document Breivik styles himself as a Christian conservative, patriot and nationalist. He looks down on neo-Nazis as “underprivileged racist skinheads with a short temper.”

Part of Breivik’s manifesto was taken almost word for word from the first few pages of the anti-technology manifesto written by “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who is in federal prison for mail bombs that killed three people and injured 23 others across the U.S. from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Breivik did not cite Kaczynski, though he did for many other people whose writings he used.

Breivik changed a Kaczynski screed on leftism and what he considered to be leftists’ “feelings of inferiority” — mainly by substituting the words “multiculturalism” or “cultural Marxism” for “leftism.”